My back of the envelope, wild-assed guess: we got hosed04:40:00 on 2007-01-30

I've been stressing out ever since I we got our W-2s at work. I do a quick calculation based on what we have on our forms and the standard deduction to see what happens with our taxes, roughly. This year I showed us coming up really, really short. Like, four thousand dollars short.

Gulp.

In the last year we both claim as married, and I figured we'd get a decent amount back like we always had. Instead, this year our taxes are a mess because of my mother's death benefit, the house, the extended sales tax deductions, a lot of things. It's not quite as simple as putting in the standard deduction and figuring it out as it used to be.

Sure, this year I get to claim the interest paid on the house and the taxes. I can take off sales taxes on the car. I can scrape off a few dollars here and yon for this miscellaneous deduction and that one that I didn't account for, I'm sure. But in the end? My best guess calculation is that we're going to still owe about $1800.00 ($1807.00 by my guess, to be more precise). We'll find out how accurate I am. Don't even get me started on penalties for underpayment.

Marilynn keeps giving me grief: "you don't know, we're taking it to a professional this year." Okay, fine, but I've been doing my own for years, and I learned a bit here and there working at the tax software place those two tax seasons. There's not a lot of real magic in the tax code, it's quite plain — it's just Byzantine. In general, IRS publications are quite frank about what is allowed and what isn't. It's easy to dig up the information and find out what you can and can't claim.

Some people at work use this one guy who apparently works miracles and gets them thousands upon thousands of dollars back. Saving us from paying $1800.00 would be a miracle. I just don't know where he's going to squeeze blood out of the stone, but we're going to see him and see what he can do. I hope he's as good as they say.

It's come down to either (a) at least one of us needs to have extra withholding taken out of our checks, (b) one or both of us should claim single to get our old rate of withholding or (c) I need to save more money into the bank every paycheck to pay our income taxes, because at this rate we'll come up short every year. None of these options are agreeable, because either way we end up with less money to accomplish debt service and save.

What worries me more is that if we have a change in administration we might see some of the tax deductions evaporate. I can't stand George the Lesser, but I don't want to see even more money taken out of our pockets. At least I haven't started voting Republican yet.